I used to love her.
I was eight when I met her little sister. We were playmates. She taught me so much. She was my partner in learning about BASIC programming, File IO and storage and plain old game playing. Those memories are still some of the fondest ones I have.

As time marched on, she and I spent less and less time together and grew apart.

When I was 15, I met her. She was beautiful. She had grace, style and sophistication. She wore beige. She was groundbreaking and trend-setting. Others imitated her style but were afraid to admit it. Others wanted to do well the things that she did well and not only did they fail, but they pretended that they were not trying to be like her. She was fast. She was powerful. At the time, she was almost perfect.

I learned even more from her than I learned from her sister. She and I had ever more fun. She made me into a gamer. We played flight sims and first person shooters. We wrote programs. We did homework. We did real-work. I loved her and she loved me. She accepted me for who I was and I accepted her for who she was. What I loved most about her was the fact that most other people didn't see, or couldn't recognize her beauty. It was like a nerdy girl in glasses that was still hot anyway. For nearly 10 years of my life, she was my absolute best friend.

Then things changed. Her father moved back to town. He convinced her that my love wasn't good enough, that she wasn't good enough. She had to change, whether she and I liked it or not. Instead of my love, she was to court the love of businessmen in suits. Instead of my acceptance, she was to seek the acceptance of journalists and purchasing managers who had never had a kind word to say about her.

In time, she changed. She was no longer the friend that I had known for a large portion of my life. She became pretentious, ostentatious and elitist. As much as it broke my heart, I had to turn my back on her because she had turned her back on me and never looked in my direction again.

If you too were a Mac user before the return of Steve Jobs and are currently not one, you know exactly what I'm talking about. The Macs that I knew and loved are now gone. Instead of doing things differently because it was better, Macs have become about doing things differently for the sake of being different.